Professional Advantage has Released The Retailer's Portal at Retail Expo 2009
A complete communications and management platform for multi-outlet Australian retailers
Sydney, 20th August 2009... Professional Advantage has launched The Retailer's Portal, an Australian-developed and supported Internet platform that helps multi-outlet retail organisations to improve communication and collaboration between stores, automate manual and paper-based processes, and store and manage key content.
In addition the Retailer's Portal provides role-specific views and functionality to support head office staff, store managers, master franchisees and store operators.
Built on market-leading Microsoft Office SharePoint Server technology, The Retailer's Portal provides secure access to management information such as business performance reports and analytics. The Portal currently integrates “out of the box” with Microsoft Dynamics RMS for search and reporting, and can also publish most existing in-house reports to provide multi dimensional, real-time data by store, by category, by salesperson or by product.
“Professional Advantage has developed and implemented a variety of retail industry applications and solutions over the years through our work with brands such as Beacon Lighting, Muffin Break, Pasarella, Guess and Starbucks. We've seen the challenges that retailers go through, grappling with multiple systems and data sources, and a variety of communication touch points. What we've created is a centralised environment that brings all these elements together for better business unity,” said Andrew MacKenzie, information worker business manager, Professional Advantage.
The Retailer's Portal acts as a central store for documents, product lists, news, reports and any other information. It includes calendars to support the creation of schedules or rosters and offers a variety of pre-configured forms for every day requirements such as staff leave requests, credit applications and customer loyalty registration. Built-in work flow routines route the forms to the appropriate manager for action and/or approval, creating a compliance-ready audit trail along the way.
Acknowledging the high staff turnover rates that typify the retail environment, The Retailer's Portal is designed for maximum ease-of-use and requires no staff training. “When we began developing The Retailer's Portal, our thought was that nobody receives training in Google or Facebook. Our aim was to replicate that level of intuitiveness so that anybody could immediately start using the solution,” added MacKenzie.
The Retailer's Portal will be released by Professional Advantage on 11 August at the Australian Retail Expo 2009. The Portal is available as a licensed package or as a hosted service and both options can be deployed within a day.